Who was the first person to patent the jet engine?
Answer: A
Frank Whittle patented it first.
He filed his turbojet patent in January 1930 at the age of twenty-three. The Air Ministry showed no interest, and he could not afford the fee to renew it in 1935, which is why Hans von Ohain in Germany was able to patent independently.
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This statesman, scholar and inventor, an early President of the United States, invented the swivel chair, the spherical sundial, the mouldboard plough and the cipher wheel. Who was he?
Answer: D
He was Thomas Jefferson.
The third President invented a swivel chair, on which he is said to have drafted the Declaration of Independence, a spherical sundial, an improved mouldboard plough and a wheel cipher. He never patented anything, holding that ideas should be free.
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Who invented Airship (rigid)?
Answer: C
Ferdinand von Zeppelin invented the rigid airship.
His LZ-1 flew in 1900, with a rigid aluminium frame covered in fabric holding separate gas cells. Zeppelins carried passengers across the Atlantic until the Hindenburg burned at Lakehurst in 1937.
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This English inventor is known as the 'Father of Computing.'
Answer: D
He is Charles Babbage.
His Analytical Engine, designed from 1837, had a store, a mill, punched-card input and conditional branching - the essentials of a computer, a century before one was built. It was never completed.
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In which decade was the telephone invented?
Answer: C
Alexander Graham Bell's notebook entry of 10 March 1876 describes his successful experiment with the telephone. Speaking through the instrument to his assistant, Thomas A. Watson, in the next room, Bell utters these famous first words, "Mr. Watson -- come here -- I want to see you".
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Who first patented dynamite?
Answer: B
Alfred Nobel patented it.
Nitroglycerine was too unstable to handle safely; in 1867 he found that absorbing it in kieselguhr made it manageable, and patented the result as dynamite. The fortune it earned endowed the Nobel Prizes.
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What office item was invented by Bette Nesmith Graham in 1951?
Answer: C
It was Liquid Paper.
Bette Nesmith Graham, a typist at a Dallas bank, mixed white tempera paint in a kitchen blender to cover her mistakes, and sold the correction fluid from her garage. She sold the company to Gillette in 1979 for $47.5 million.
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What Igor Sikorsky invented?
Answer: C
Igor Sikorsky invented the helicopter.
The Russian-born American engineer flew the VS-300 in 1939, the first practical single-rotor helicopter with a tail rotor to counter torque - the configuration almost every helicopter has used since.
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Who is often called the 'first African-American' inventor?
Answer: C
It is Benjamin Banneker.
A free African-American of Maryland, he built a striking wooden clock in 1753 from his own calculations, compiled almanacs with astronomical tables, and helped survey the boundaries of the District of Columbia.
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What Elmer A. Sperry invented?
Answer: D
Elmer Sperry invented the gyrocompass.
Patented in 1908, it uses a spinning gyroscope to find true north rather than magnetic north, and is unaffected by the iron of a ship's hull. It made accurate navigation in steel warships possible.
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